Post by eurofed on Sept 7, 2020 0:16:35 GMT
I have been working on a 19th century TL that climaxes into an alt-WWI. This version of the Great War is close to a strategic hybrid of our World Wars and the TL-191 one, although with a reversed good-guy/bad-guy alignment of the coalitions and America still playing for the good guys. In a way, the TL is a remake with an earlier PoD and slightly different course of my "A different 1860s" TL. I am looking for some constructive feedback on the peace settlement and the postwar world. The main divergences occur during the American Revolution (the Canadian colonies join the Patriots; the Deep South and Caribbean ones stay Loyalist and absorb the Greater Antilles and Northern Mexico to form a CSA-style equivalent of Canada), the Napoleonic Wars (Britain grabs the Southern Cone and the Dutch East Indies; France gets an harsher peace deal due to a prolonged Hundred Days; Russia, Prussia, and Austria get more land), and more successful 1848-49 Revolutions.
ITTL the Spring of Nations is a decisive success in Germany, Italy, and the Habsburg Empire. In combination with an expanded equivalent of the Crimean War that enables liberation of Eastern Europe, it leads to the rise of a bloc of liberal-democratic and federal states (Greater Germany, Greater Italy, Poland-Lithuania, Hungary-Croatia-Romania). It evolves into a proto-EU/NATO with vigorous industrialization and is later joined by Greater Netherlands and Scandinavia. France turns out much like OTL, exploits the revolution to grab Wallonia and the French-speaking lands it lost in 1815, but eventually stumbles into an expanded equivalent of the Franco-Prussian War vs. Germany and Italy. It suffers a worse defeat with greater territorial losses and the shock turns it into a proto-fascist power. It absorbs Spain and Portugal to form a Franco-Iberian union thanks to far-right destabilization and civil wars.
Russia is pushed back into 1939 borders but seizes good consolation prizes thanks to a temporary alliance of convenience with the CP and compromise deals with Britain. They allow it to get a more favorable outcome from the Russo-Turkish War (northern Near East, a Serb-Bulgarian client state, expulsion of the Ottomans from the Balkans and eastern Anatolia) and land grabs at the expense of China (Xinjiang, Manchuria, Mongolia). Alexandrine reforms are more successful but Russia eventually stumbles into the Russo-Japanese War. It suffers a decisive defeat that costs it Greater Manchuria and the resulting revolutionary unrest turns it into another proto-fascist power.
Japan modernizes much like OTL but the influence of Germany, Italy, and the USA turns it more liberal-democratic. It grants an equal place at the table to annexed Korea and the resulting union colonizes Greater Manchuria, Formosa, Hainan, and Sakhalin/Karafuto. Proto-fascism spreads to Serbia-Bulgaria out of frustrated nationalist ambitions, Turkey out of a desperate strive for national rebirth, and Brazil out of unrest about the slavery issue.
Britain is not much different from OTL apart from endorsing quasi-slavery apartheid in the settler Dominions. Anti-hegemonic paranoia about the rising power of the CP bloc misleads it into joining the Entente alliance with the proto-fascist gang and sharing its fate.
Eventually an equivalent of WWI occurs between the liberal-democratic Allies (Germany, Italy, P-L, H-C-R, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Greece, Japan-Korea, USA) and the mostly authoritarian Entente (Britain, France-Iberia, Russia, Serbia-Bulgaria, Turkey, Brazil). The Allies win a decisive victory with some serious effort and impose a harsh peace on the defeated states. The topic at hand is to examine and discuss the features of such a peace.
The Entente powers' proto-fascist nastiness, historical pattern of aggression, and support of nationalist terrorism as a destabilization tool anger the victors into imposing a harsh Versailles/Potsdam-style peace, with extensive territorial losses and an attempt to eliminate or lessen their future warmaking potential. Their use of sympathetic minorities as a support base for terrorism and a justification for aggression inspire the victors to suppress similar threats in the future by means of extensive forced population transfers.
Due to this and other compelling precedents, TTL culture does not develop the notion of forced population transfers as a war crime or crime against humanity if they are done in humane conditions. They continue to be regarded as a legitimate and useful means to resolve ethnic or religious conflicts. The proto-fascist regimes did persecute minorities and are infamous for that, but their crimes did not come close to the systematic, large-scale atrocities of Nazism or Stalinism. France-Iberia also got notorious for its especially brutal colonial regime even by 19th century standards. In West Africa it became TTL equivalent of the Free State of Congo.
The CP states annex a few border territories from defeated enemies, but they are mostly satisfied with previous gains. However, their cumulative gains from this conflict and previous ones make up quite a sizable booty. Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands seize enough French land to consolidate a border similar to the Middle Ages one. Their total gains include western Wallonia, French Flanders, and Nord-Pas de Calais for the Netherlands; eastern Wallonia, Luxemburg, Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche-Comte for Germany; Dauphine, Provence, Savoy, Nice, and Corsica for Italy. Switzerland got partitioned between its neighbors as a result of the 1848-49 revolutions, so Romandy now suffers a similar fate.
For France, in addition to the aformentioned territorial losses and mass deportation of French-speakers in annexed territories, the peace deal involves division of the country, much like it happened to OTL Germany after WWII. The new 'natural' (and actual) borders of France become the Somme, the Aisne, the Marne, the Saone, and the Rhone. Amiens, Lyon, and Avignon are now frontier cities; Paris is close to the border; Marseilles, Lille, and Nancy are lost. Bretagne and Occitania are set up as independent countries and the victors try to foster a separate national consciousness for them. It is an open question whether such efforts are eventually successful in the long term (like post-WWII Austria) or the pull of French national identity proves too strong and the victor powers eventually allow national reunification (like East Germany).
P-L gets Belarus, but all of Ukraine proves too big for its federation to absorb. Therefore in all likelihood P-L keeps western Ukraine, and the sum of central and eastern Ukraine, Crimea, the Donbas, and the Kuban becomes an independent Ukrainian state. Russophones are expelled. H-C-R takes Bosnia; Serbs and Muslims are kicked out of Croatia, Bosnia, and Vojvodina. Serbia is shrunk to Central Serbia; Bulgaria gets OTL borders. Defeated Balkan states stay in Europe's doghouse for quite some time, like France. Scandinavia gets Finland, Estonia, Latvia, East Karelia, the Kola Peninsula, and Imbria with expulsion of Russians.
Much like France, the victors are willing and able to enforce a punitive peace on Russia that lessens its potential to be a future threat, albeit its size means they can only go so far. Russia is cut down to something close to 1992 borders with a few changes. On one hand, the victor powers lack a reliable and sympathetic Muslim or Chinese proxy, so they don't care much and/or fail to find a feasible alternative to Russian control of Central Asia and western-central Siberia. On the other hand, the Russians lose access to the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Pacific. In addition to the aforementioned Nordic and Ukrainian gains, the USA and Japan-Korea partition the Russian Far East. Japan gets Transbaikal and eastern Mongolia; the USA gets Kolyma and Kamchatka; I am not sure who gets the rest. Russia expelled Muslims from the Caucasus and the northern Near East, so it likely keeps Northern Caucasus, but independence of Georgia and Greater Armenia-Assyria and their confederal union under European protection is the most likely outcome for the rest of the region.
Russia is probably too big and strong for the CP to keep under a thumb like France, but it suffers severe losses. Therefore, its resurgence as a potential rival is possible, but it shall be more similar in power and status to 21st century Russia than the USSR. The war discredited fascism, so alternative ideology options to be a revisionist power may be communism or Putin-style nationalism. It seems too unlikely for communism to get a real chance to take root in Western Europe or the Balkans, since the victor powers can easily walk in and snuff it out in the cradle. Russia might be an exception like OTL thanks to size and distance, or it might not, since the victor powers may easily be strong enough to help the Whites get the upper hand. Britain might be another place where the Reds might take root thanks to isolation, although it is the defeated power least traumatized and prone to radical political changes. China is a third possible option.
The victor powers have reasons to give Iberia a relatively lenient treatment, so apart from the likely loss of the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, and Gibraltar to Germany and Italy, they get out relatively unscathed. Iberia is rebuilt into a democratic federal union and integrated into the new European order relatively easily. The Iberians probably get Algeria by default due to its previous union with France and joint colonization of the area. Alternatively Algeria might be partitioned between German Morocco and Italian Tunisia. ITTL North Africa was Europeanized by France-Iberia, Germany, and Italy during the 19th century, with mass removal of most Arabs and Berbers and repopulation by a mix of European settlers and culturally assimilated Arabs and Berbers.
Greece gets all the Megali Idea claims, including the Straits, Ionia, and Cyprus. Eastern Anatolia becomes an Armenian-Assyrian homeland. Palestine and Lebanon are carved out as a Jewish and Christian homeland as a compensation for previous persecution. Muslim residents of these areas are expelled. I am not sure what happens to the other Arab lands in these circumstances but their reorganization in a few Arab states seems the default solution. The most likely setup is Egypt-Sudan, Syria-Iraq, and Arabis since the Ottomans previously wiped out Arab entities. I am not sure what happens to Turkey and Persia, apart from the former losing the Straits and the areas claimed by the Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians. The victors probably don't care to enact further punitive measures. The Turks and the Persians might pick pro-Western modernization (the Ataturk path), resentful nationalism (the Erdogan path), or Islamism (the Khomeini path).
The CP already built the regional equivalent of a proto-EU/NATO before the war. In the aftermath of their outstanding success, they almost surely use this as a foundation to build up European integration to a federal outcome and a continental dimension. This version of a federal EU initially includes Germany, Italy, P-L, H-C-R, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Greece, Ukraine, Iberia, and Europeanized North Africa. Depending on which geopolitical limits the EU sets for itself, it might also come to include Israel and Georgia-Armenia-Assyria. France, Serbia, and Bulgaria in all likelihood are kept in the doghouse for a while, but eventually get a decent place in the new order provided they look sufficiently rehabilitated. Britain, Russia, and Turkey in all likelihood stand apart.
Britain no doubt is a defeated power too and has to pay a serious price for that, but it has decent chances of getting out of this mess with less losses than its allies. The sum of the naval power of Germany, Italy, America, and Japan is surely enough to overwhelm the RN and force the British to accept the loss of a sizable portion of the Empire, but perhaps not yet enough at the turn of the century to force a complete surrender. Surely Britain loses any asset and influence in Europe and the Med, and the Americans seize Southern America and Australia (the latter with the assistance of the Japanese). I am not sure if in this period the Americans can already project enough influence to conquer the Southern Cone and Brazil too. If they can do it w/o excessive effort, they do. Southeast Asia gets lost to a combined American-Japanese assault.
I am not sure what happens to India. It is kinda outside the reach of the victor powers, so the British may well keep it for a while. Defeat might inspire the Indian nationalists to try their luck with rebellion. The British may retain enough power to stage a successful repression, and the Indian independence movement was not yet that strong or well organized at the turn of the century. The victors may or may not be able and willing to send aid to the Indians. Egypt is surely lost. South Africa in all likelihood stays bound to the motherland. Ireland might go in various ways, However, unless Britain falls to revolution, in all likelihood the British are less willing to let the Irish go, and the victors not dominant or caring enough to force a different outcome.
TTL version of the USA is liberal enough not to have any serious problems with absorbing large numbers of Catholics, Southern/Eastern Europeans, Asians, Romance-speakers, Europeanized Natives and mixed-bloods. On the other hand, the Americans avoided being burdened by the legacy of slavery thanks to swift abolition after independence and sending the slaves to Africa or other parts of the New World. This represents a compelling precedent that makes them quite unwilling to absorb a significant Black minority. They all but surely plan to annex a sizable portion of the Western Hemisphere and Oceania, and organize the rest into a Pan-American EU/NATO system with an aim to ever-closer union in the long term after a sufficient degree of socio-economic and political grooming. Priority candidates for US annexation surely include Black-free Southern America, Mexico-Central America, Colombia-Venezuela, and Australia-NZ. The most distant or troublesome portions of South America instead join the integrated US sphere of influence.
Their preferred solution to the problem of the unwanted African diaspora is its mass resettlement into West Africa. They earmark a sizable chunk of the region to build a super-Liberia. Since the Americans regard the Western Hemisphere at large as their playground and its integration under their leadership as a long-term goal, they plan for the large-scale transfer of the entire African diaspora in the Americas into its new West African homeland. They are willing to use force to overcome any resistance and make the necessary economic and logistic effort to enact the resettlement. On the other hand, they are also open-minded to do it in humane conditions and provide a reasonable amount of help to let the new nation thrive, with the resources they can spare from rebuilding the New World and Oceania in their image.
Japan-Korea gains a portion of the Far East, entrenches its hegemony of Northeast Asia and the South China Sea, and builds a sphere of influence across Southeast Asia. Han and Russian settlement of Greater Manchuria was prevented or removed, so the region becomes an integral part of the Japanese-Korean core. The Japanese Empire is nicer and more liberal-democratic than OTL, and they came to the other Asian peoples as liberators and modernizers. Therefore in all likelihood its hegemony of Southeast Asia becomes more benevolent and accepted, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere equivalent takes a genuine EU/NATO-style character. It still faces a resurgent and jealous China as an external threat in the long term. However, the Japanese are too busy and satisfied to mess with China overmuch besides supporting a few local proxies. The Americans already got vast gains in the Western Hemisphere and Oceania, so they don't mind letting Japan have the Philippines.
China got hit harder by Qing decline and failure, leading to the lasting loss of all non-Han border territories and a worse Boxer Rebellion, which expanded into a large-scale and brutal foreign invasion. The Great War and its aftermath gave the Chinese room to stage a revolution, recover control of China proper besides a few port exclaves, and deal with their domestic problems w/o too much foreign interference. However, previous trauma and failures were bad enough that the short-term outcome of the revolution is another period of warlord chaos and national fragmentation. The most likely outcome is division between a neo-monarchist North and a Nationalist South, with the warlords as an opportunist third faction. The Communists may or may not emerge and take root to be the dark horse or at least a meaningful fourth faction. One faction among the Nationalists, Communists, and neo-Monarchists may eventually get the upper hand and reunify China. Chances are they won't well-meaning for their neighbors or the rest of the world.
It is an open question whether the premises exist in the postwar world for another global conflict. Serious antagonism escalating to an armed fight between CP-led Europe, US-led Western Hemisphere, and Japan-led East Asia seems unlikely. The blocs seem too vast, resource-rich, and separate, and their hegemons too satisfied and busy, to justify it. The defeated powers seem too weakened to sustain a rematch on their own. However, a revisionist coalition of Britain, Russia, China, and an ISIS-style entity in the Muslim world might well be strong enough to justify a try, esp. if it involves an ideology with a sufficient level of nastiness and craziness. Fascism failed its trail of fire, but communism and nationalist populism are still options. Much the same way, Islamism might still rise to become a serious problem in the Middle East.
ITTL the Spring of Nations is a decisive success in Germany, Italy, and the Habsburg Empire. In combination with an expanded equivalent of the Crimean War that enables liberation of Eastern Europe, it leads to the rise of a bloc of liberal-democratic and federal states (Greater Germany, Greater Italy, Poland-Lithuania, Hungary-Croatia-Romania). It evolves into a proto-EU/NATO with vigorous industrialization and is later joined by Greater Netherlands and Scandinavia. France turns out much like OTL, exploits the revolution to grab Wallonia and the French-speaking lands it lost in 1815, but eventually stumbles into an expanded equivalent of the Franco-Prussian War vs. Germany and Italy. It suffers a worse defeat with greater territorial losses and the shock turns it into a proto-fascist power. It absorbs Spain and Portugal to form a Franco-Iberian union thanks to far-right destabilization and civil wars.
Russia is pushed back into 1939 borders but seizes good consolation prizes thanks to a temporary alliance of convenience with the CP and compromise deals with Britain. They allow it to get a more favorable outcome from the Russo-Turkish War (northern Near East, a Serb-Bulgarian client state, expulsion of the Ottomans from the Balkans and eastern Anatolia) and land grabs at the expense of China (Xinjiang, Manchuria, Mongolia). Alexandrine reforms are more successful but Russia eventually stumbles into the Russo-Japanese War. It suffers a decisive defeat that costs it Greater Manchuria and the resulting revolutionary unrest turns it into another proto-fascist power.
Japan modernizes much like OTL but the influence of Germany, Italy, and the USA turns it more liberal-democratic. It grants an equal place at the table to annexed Korea and the resulting union colonizes Greater Manchuria, Formosa, Hainan, and Sakhalin/Karafuto. Proto-fascism spreads to Serbia-Bulgaria out of frustrated nationalist ambitions, Turkey out of a desperate strive for national rebirth, and Brazil out of unrest about the slavery issue.
Britain is not much different from OTL apart from endorsing quasi-slavery apartheid in the settler Dominions. Anti-hegemonic paranoia about the rising power of the CP bloc misleads it into joining the Entente alliance with the proto-fascist gang and sharing its fate.
Eventually an equivalent of WWI occurs between the liberal-democratic Allies (Germany, Italy, P-L, H-C-R, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Greece, Japan-Korea, USA) and the mostly authoritarian Entente (Britain, France-Iberia, Russia, Serbia-Bulgaria, Turkey, Brazil). The Allies win a decisive victory with some serious effort and impose a harsh peace on the defeated states. The topic at hand is to examine and discuss the features of such a peace.
The Entente powers' proto-fascist nastiness, historical pattern of aggression, and support of nationalist terrorism as a destabilization tool anger the victors into imposing a harsh Versailles/Potsdam-style peace, with extensive territorial losses and an attempt to eliminate or lessen their future warmaking potential. Their use of sympathetic minorities as a support base for terrorism and a justification for aggression inspire the victors to suppress similar threats in the future by means of extensive forced population transfers.
Due to this and other compelling precedents, TTL culture does not develop the notion of forced population transfers as a war crime or crime against humanity if they are done in humane conditions. They continue to be regarded as a legitimate and useful means to resolve ethnic or religious conflicts. The proto-fascist regimes did persecute minorities and are infamous for that, but their crimes did not come close to the systematic, large-scale atrocities of Nazism or Stalinism. France-Iberia also got notorious for its especially brutal colonial regime even by 19th century standards. In West Africa it became TTL equivalent of the Free State of Congo.
The CP states annex a few border territories from defeated enemies, but they are mostly satisfied with previous gains. However, their cumulative gains from this conflict and previous ones make up quite a sizable booty. Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands seize enough French land to consolidate a border similar to the Middle Ages one. Their total gains include western Wallonia, French Flanders, and Nord-Pas de Calais for the Netherlands; eastern Wallonia, Luxemburg, Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche-Comte for Germany; Dauphine, Provence, Savoy, Nice, and Corsica for Italy. Switzerland got partitioned between its neighbors as a result of the 1848-49 revolutions, so Romandy now suffers a similar fate.
For France, in addition to the aformentioned territorial losses and mass deportation of French-speakers in annexed territories, the peace deal involves division of the country, much like it happened to OTL Germany after WWII. The new 'natural' (and actual) borders of France become the Somme, the Aisne, the Marne, the Saone, and the Rhone. Amiens, Lyon, and Avignon are now frontier cities; Paris is close to the border; Marseilles, Lille, and Nancy are lost. Bretagne and Occitania are set up as independent countries and the victors try to foster a separate national consciousness for them. It is an open question whether such efforts are eventually successful in the long term (like post-WWII Austria) or the pull of French national identity proves too strong and the victor powers eventually allow national reunification (like East Germany).
P-L gets Belarus, but all of Ukraine proves too big for its federation to absorb. Therefore in all likelihood P-L keeps western Ukraine, and the sum of central and eastern Ukraine, Crimea, the Donbas, and the Kuban becomes an independent Ukrainian state. Russophones are expelled. H-C-R takes Bosnia; Serbs and Muslims are kicked out of Croatia, Bosnia, and Vojvodina. Serbia is shrunk to Central Serbia; Bulgaria gets OTL borders. Defeated Balkan states stay in Europe's doghouse for quite some time, like France. Scandinavia gets Finland, Estonia, Latvia, East Karelia, the Kola Peninsula, and Imbria with expulsion of Russians.
Much like France, the victors are willing and able to enforce a punitive peace on Russia that lessens its potential to be a future threat, albeit its size means they can only go so far. Russia is cut down to something close to 1992 borders with a few changes. On one hand, the victor powers lack a reliable and sympathetic Muslim or Chinese proxy, so they don't care much and/or fail to find a feasible alternative to Russian control of Central Asia and western-central Siberia. On the other hand, the Russians lose access to the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Pacific. In addition to the aforementioned Nordic and Ukrainian gains, the USA and Japan-Korea partition the Russian Far East. Japan gets Transbaikal and eastern Mongolia; the USA gets Kolyma and Kamchatka; I am not sure who gets the rest. Russia expelled Muslims from the Caucasus and the northern Near East, so it likely keeps Northern Caucasus, but independence of Georgia and Greater Armenia-Assyria and their confederal union under European protection is the most likely outcome for the rest of the region.
Russia is probably too big and strong for the CP to keep under a thumb like France, but it suffers severe losses. Therefore, its resurgence as a potential rival is possible, but it shall be more similar in power and status to 21st century Russia than the USSR. The war discredited fascism, so alternative ideology options to be a revisionist power may be communism or Putin-style nationalism. It seems too unlikely for communism to get a real chance to take root in Western Europe or the Balkans, since the victor powers can easily walk in and snuff it out in the cradle. Russia might be an exception like OTL thanks to size and distance, or it might not, since the victor powers may easily be strong enough to help the Whites get the upper hand. Britain might be another place where the Reds might take root thanks to isolation, although it is the defeated power least traumatized and prone to radical political changes. China is a third possible option.
The victor powers have reasons to give Iberia a relatively lenient treatment, so apart from the likely loss of the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, and Gibraltar to Germany and Italy, they get out relatively unscathed. Iberia is rebuilt into a democratic federal union and integrated into the new European order relatively easily. The Iberians probably get Algeria by default due to its previous union with France and joint colonization of the area. Alternatively Algeria might be partitioned between German Morocco and Italian Tunisia. ITTL North Africa was Europeanized by France-Iberia, Germany, and Italy during the 19th century, with mass removal of most Arabs and Berbers and repopulation by a mix of European settlers and culturally assimilated Arabs and Berbers.
Greece gets all the Megali Idea claims, including the Straits, Ionia, and Cyprus. Eastern Anatolia becomes an Armenian-Assyrian homeland. Palestine and Lebanon are carved out as a Jewish and Christian homeland as a compensation for previous persecution. Muslim residents of these areas are expelled. I am not sure what happens to the other Arab lands in these circumstances but their reorganization in a few Arab states seems the default solution. The most likely setup is Egypt-Sudan, Syria-Iraq, and Arabis since the Ottomans previously wiped out Arab entities. I am not sure what happens to Turkey and Persia, apart from the former losing the Straits and the areas claimed by the Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians. The victors probably don't care to enact further punitive measures. The Turks and the Persians might pick pro-Western modernization (the Ataturk path), resentful nationalism (the Erdogan path), or Islamism (the Khomeini path).
The CP already built the regional equivalent of a proto-EU/NATO before the war. In the aftermath of their outstanding success, they almost surely use this as a foundation to build up European integration to a federal outcome and a continental dimension. This version of a federal EU initially includes Germany, Italy, P-L, H-C-R, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Greece, Ukraine, Iberia, and Europeanized North Africa. Depending on which geopolitical limits the EU sets for itself, it might also come to include Israel and Georgia-Armenia-Assyria. France, Serbia, and Bulgaria in all likelihood are kept in the doghouse for a while, but eventually get a decent place in the new order provided they look sufficiently rehabilitated. Britain, Russia, and Turkey in all likelihood stand apart.
Britain no doubt is a defeated power too and has to pay a serious price for that, but it has decent chances of getting out of this mess with less losses than its allies. The sum of the naval power of Germany, Italy, America, and Japan is surely enough to overwhelm the RN and force the British to accept the loss of a sizable portion of the Empire, but perhaps not yet enough at the turn of the century to force a complete surrender. Surely Britain loses any asset and influence in Europe and the Med, and the Americans seize Southern America and Australia (the latter with the assistance of the Japanese). I am not sure if in this period the Americans can already project enough influence to conquer the Southern Cone and Brazil too. If they can do it w/o excessive effort, they do. Southeast Asia gets lost to a combined American-Japanese assault.
I am not sure what happens to India. It is kinda outside the reach of the victor powers, so the British may well keep it for a while. Defeat might inspire the Indian nationalists to try their luck with rebellion. The British may retain enough power to stage a successful repression, and the Indian independence movement was not yet that strong or well organized at the turn of the century. The victors may or may not be able and willing to send aid to the Indians. Egypt is surely lost. South Africa in all likelihood stays bound to the motherland. Ireland might go in various ways, However, unless Britain falls to revolution, in all likelihood the British are less willing to let the Irish go, and the victors not dominant or caring enough to force a different outcome.
TTL version of the USA is liberal enough not to have any serious problems with absorbing large numbers of Catholics, Southern/Eastern Europeans, Asians, Romance-speakers, Europeanized Natives and mixed-bloods. On the other hand, the Americans avoided being burdened by the legacy of slavery thanks to swift abolition after independence and sending the slaves to Africa or other parts of the New World. This represents a compelling precedent that makes them quite unwilling to absorb a significant Black minority. They all but surely plan to annex a sizable portion of the Western Hemisphere and Oceania, and organize the rest into a Pan-American EU/NATO system with an aim to ever-closer union in the long term after a sufficient degree of socio-economic and political grooming. Priority candidates for US annexation surely include Black-free Southern America, Mexico-Central America, Colombia-Venezuela, and Australia-NZ. The most distant or troublesome portions of South America instead join the integrated US sphere of influence.
Their preferred solution to the problem of the unwanted African diaspora is its mass resettlement into West Africa. They earmark a sizable chunk of the region to build a super-Liberia. Since the Americans regard the Western Hemisphere at large as their playground and its integration under their leadership as a long-term goal, they plan for the large-scale transfer of the entire African diaspora in the Americas into its new West African homeland. They are willing to use force to overcome any resistance and make the necessary economic and logistic effort to enact the resettlement. On the other hand, they are also open-minded to do it in humane conditions and provide a reasonable amount of help to let the new nation thrive, with the resources they can spare from rebuilding the New World and Oceania in their image.
Japan-Korea gains a portion of the Far East, entrenches its hegemony of Northeast Asia and the South China Sea, and builds a sphere of influence across Southeast Asia. Han and Russian settlement of Greater Manchuria was prevented or removed, so the region becomes an integral part of the Japanese-Korean core. The Japanese Empire is nicer and more liberal-democratic than OTL, and they came to the other Asian peoples as liberators and modernizers. Therefore in all likelihood its hegemony of Southeast Asia becomes more benevolent and accepted, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere equivalent takes a genuine EU/NATO-style character. It still faces a resurgent and jealous China as an external threat in the long term. However, the Japanese are too busy and satisfied to mess with China overmuch besides supporting a few local proxies. The Americans already got vast gains in the Western Hemisphere and Oceania, so they don't mind letting Japan have the Philippines.
China got hit harder by Qing decline and failure, leading to the lasting loss of all non-Han border territories and a worse Boxer Rebellion, which expanded into a large-scale and brutal foreign invasion. The Great War and its aftermath gave the Chinese room to stage a revolution, recover control of China proper besides a few port exclaves, and deal with their domestic problems w/o too much foreign interference. However, previous trauma and failures were bad enough that the short-term outcome of the revolution is another period of warlord chaos and national fragmentation. The most likely outcome is division between a neo-monarchist North and a Nationalist South, with the warlords as an opportunist third faction. The Communists may or may not emerge and take root to be the dark horse or at least a meaningful fourth faction. One faction among the Nationalists, Communists, and neo-Monarchists may eventually get the upper hand and reunify China. Chances are they won't well-meaning for their neighbors or the rest of the world.
It is an open question whether the premises exist in the postwar world for another global conflict. Serious antagonism escalating to an armed fight between CP-led Europe, US-led Western Hemisphere, and Japan-led East Asia seems unlikely. The blocs seem too vast, resource-rich, and separate, and their hegemons too satisfied and busy, to justify it. The defeated powers seem too weakened to sustain a rematch on their own. However, a revisionist coalition of Britain, Russia, China, and an ISIS-style entity in the Muslim world might well be strong enough to justify a try, esp. if it involves an ideology with a sufficient level of nastiness and craziness. Fascism failed its trail of fire, but communism and nationalist populism are still options. Much the same way, Islamism might still rise to become a serious problem in the Middle East.